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August 30, 2012

Interview with Gregory Spatz

Gregory
Spatz unearthed his family history of Arctic exploration, starvation,
notoriety, romance, and publishing as he prepared to write his latest novel Inukshuk.
There’s a little lead poisoning, cannibalism, and other intrigue wrapped in
the stories about that distant branch of his mother’s relatives.

Talk about having material to draw on.

But Spatz doesn’t simply present a new novel that has drawn
praise from the likes of Karen Joy Fowler and a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. A fiddler who plays
with two bands, he also recorded two songs to accompany Inukshuk that book purchasers can download from his website at no charge. And the book
earned him a 2012 NEA Literature Fellowship.

Spatz has taught in the creative writing program at Eastern
Washington University for the last 15 years. He also is author of two othernovels,Fiddler’s
DreamandNo One But Us, as
well as the short story collectionWonderful
Tricks. Spatz has a new short-story collection coming out early next
year titled Half as Happy. And he has
a list of publishing credits and writing accolades that run from Glimmer Train tothe New Yorker.

Native Home of Hope recently
interviewed Spatz to find out how one goes from violin to pen, when to admit
you’re a writer, and additional details of his notable family history.

“The most rewarding part of teaching writing is sharing that pleasure and excitement with student writers. And then seeing them grow as writers – seeing them suddenly break through into better work.” ~ Gregory Spatz

Why did you switch from teaching
violin to writing?

I wouldn’t say that I “switched.” I taught violin to pay the
rent before I made any money as a writer or teacher of writing. It was a really
decent way to make a living – easy to keep it part-time and still make enough
money to stay afloat; low stress, and no take-home work. It left me a lot of
time and energy for writing. Sometimes I miss those aspects of teaching violin.

But I didn’t like the instability. Violin lessons are
anyone’s lowest priority – so if money gets tight, the lessons stop. If things
get busy, no practicing happens. The students who were serious and invested in
getting better were a blast to teach, and many of them became good friends. Too
often I found myself either worrying about my income, coming up short, or
falsely encouraging people who hadn’t done anything and weren’t making
progress, just so they’d keep coming back and paying me. I hated that – finding
different ways to say “Good job” every week. I never intended to make it a
lifelong thing. My long-term plan was always to start publishing and eventually
find an MFA teaching job. I don’t regret that, but I wish I would have
appreciated how low stress teaching private violin lessons is by comparison
with teaching at a university.

What was the most challenging aspect of that transition?

Finding a teaching job.

What was the most rewarding?

Feeling engrossed in a story and doing a good day’s work.
The other stuff – prizes, publications, words of praise – is also rewarding,
but not as deeply satisfying. The pleasure in that kind of reward evaporates
quickly, I find. I still like it and need it, but it doesn’t do nearly as much
for me as being lost in the work and plugging away at it.

The most rewarding part of teaching writing is sharing that
pleasure and excitement with student writers. And then seeing them grow as
writers – seeing them suddenly break through into better work.

Do you prefer to be
identified as Greg or Gregory?

When I was first getting started as a writer I made this
decision that when I started publishing I would use my full legal name Gregory.
I’m not sure why. Maybe it was to protect and define that part of my
professional life – distinguish it from my music career and day-to-day life. Gregory would be the writer, Greg would be the guy I was the rest of the
time. People who I played music with didn’t know anything about my writing, and
vice versa. So the name separation helped keep that straight. Now basically
everyone I know calls me Greg, and everyone I know is in on both my music and
writing lives. Still, it looks wrong to me if I see anything in print relating
to my writing life with the name Greg
attached to it. Looks amputated or something. Not mine. And if I’m on stage
playing and someone introduces me as Gregory
I feel like I’m suddenly at a legal hearing or expected to give a reading.

Why didn’t you tell
people you played music when you were writing?

I needed to be taken seriously as a musician. I was already
younger than most people I was working with, which could be a challenge as far
as getting work, so the last thing I needed was for them to have any notion
that I was some kind of hobbyist.
Among full-time, gigging musicians there can be a bit of a prejudice against
players who aren’t in the game 100 percent.

Also, it was just too much trouble and too complicated to
explain. I didn’t want to answer all the usual questions – no, I don’t write
romances; no, I don’t write mysteries, sci-fi, or horror; I haven’t read The Bridges of Madison County, etc.And I had no publications to point to, so maybe
the real truth is I just felt too unsure of myself to be comfortable explaining
what I wanted to write and why.

That all changed as I started getting a foothold in my
writing career, publishing stories, and simultaneously started focusing more
exclusively on playing only music I liked
rather than playing any and every gig that would pay. As my focuses shifted, I learned that the bluegrass polymath
is actually pretty common and soon I found myself in a scene – this was in the
San Francisco Bay area – surrounded by people who were readers, thinkers, many
of them college educated with professional careers in fields outside music who
were also very serious about music.

I do still sometimes find myself in musical situations where
I can see right away there’s no point in mentioning that I also write books. So
I don’t. I don’t keep it a secret, I just don’t mention it. And vice versa.
Bluegrass can be just as specialized, obscure, arcane, and generally
misunderstood in the wide-world as literary fiction, and sometimes I find myself
in situations with writing/editing people where I know it isn’t going to be
worth mentioning or trying to explain what I play or why. And that’s fine too.

~ ~ ~

A musical interludeGregory gave us permission to post two of his original compositions. For more information, go to his website.

“Lancaster Sound” – this original instrumental by Greg features John Reischman and the Jaybirds: John Reischman on mandolin; Jim Nunally on guitar; Nick Hornbuckle on banjo; Trisha Gagnon on bass; Greg on fiddle. It was written on a cold winter night in the midst of research about the Franklin crew. In August, 1845, sailing from Baffin Bay into Lancaster Sound, Franklin and crew met up with a whaling ship. This was to the be their last known encounter with other Europeans.Click here to play “Lancaster Sound.”

“Lady Franklin's Lament” features the world-music folk quartet Mighty Squirrel: Caridwen Spatz on fiddle and vocals; David Keenan on National guitar; Nova Devonie on accordion; Greg on bouzouki. The melody has its roots in a traditional Irish fiddle tune of the era (1860s), “The Croppy Boy,” and the lyrics are from a popular broadside, also from the era.

I’ve written lots of instrumentals. I’ll go through periods
where I’m coming up with a new tune every other day. But never songs with
lyrics. I think this is because I always hear music in my head while I’m
writing, oftentimes stuff I wrote or played on. The notes in my head generally
feel as if they’re informing the words on the page, secretly imbuing them with
some feeling. And vice versa: often while I’m playing I’ll be working through
scenes in my head, thinking about characters or recollecting the emotional
residue of a scene. By the end of the process the music will be so
interpenetrated with the feelings from whatever I was writing that for years
afterward, permanently even, I can’t separate the two things – can’t play or
hear a particular song without recollecting all the feelings and details of
whatever scene I was writing, can’t re-read a passage without hearing those
notes in my head.

Putting actual words to my own music seems like a whole
different skill set. I admire people who do it well. I have no desire to try
it. I’m happy keeping my verbal responses to melodies on the printed page.

What is your favorite fiddle tune?

That changes day-to-day and depends on which instrument I’m
playing. I love playing John Reischman’s tunes Salt Spring, The North Shore,
and Ponies in the Forest. Almost all
of his tunes would have to be at the top of any list of favorite tunes to play.
Or sometimes I’ll get on a Kenny Baker or Bill Monroe tear and just feel like
playing all the tunes of theirs I can think of, one after another. Like
visiting old friends.

The Squirrels have always been a much-beloved side-project
for everyone in the band, so we don’t tour a lot. A couple of trips out a year
is about all anyone has time for. We do such a strange, uncategorizable brand
of music (Klezmer, Celtic, Americana, swing, originals, French Canadian) it’s
hard to book the band.

The Jaybirds play 2-3 times a month. Usually no more than
5-day tours. It’s too expensive otherwise. We’re too old and busy with other
things to hit the road like some of the younger bands who are happy living out
of a van for months at a time. I think our light tour schedule and the fact
that we almost always have separate hotel rooms is a good part of the reason
we’ve stuck together as a band with no personnel changes, and still actually
like each other, for 5 CDs and coming up on 13 years.

I re-read all the books on the list above semi-regularly
because I teach them whenever they fit the reading list. But to single out one
other book: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. It’s very satisfying, read after
read, because of the density and complexity of its construction. I don’t get
tired of trying to understand how its intertwined narrative layers intersect
without somehow ever really touching and in doing so end up providing this
wackily dramatized model of human consciousness. It’s ingenious.

Who is your favorite Western writer?

Possibly not favorite, but certainly one I’ve read the most
regularly is Raymond Carver.

Why?

His stories are so good, read after read – dense, subtle,
light, poetic, clean, spare, surprising … And I love seeing how the work
evolves and changes through his life. A story like “A Small Good Thing” I just never get tired of re-reading.

“Get a trade or a day job that pays well enough that you can work part-time (without killing yourself), and write full time when you finish the MFA. Don’t quit. Make sure to leave the program with a few trusted and reliable readers of your stories. And don’t quit. Submit your work often and be thick-skinned about it. And don’t quit.”

What’s the best writing advice you've given?

Get a trade or a day job that pays well enough that you can
work part-time (without killing yourself), and write full time when you finish
the MFA. Don’t quit. Make sure to leave the program with a few trusted and
reliable readers of your stories. And don’t quit. Submit your work often and be
thick-skinned about it. And don’t quit.

Sir John Franklin is a distant relative on my mother’s side.
He led the single most tragically failed Arctic expedition of all time. Set
sail in 1845 and perished along with all 110 of his crewmen over a period of
5-6 years stuck in the pack ice. Scurvy, lead poisoning, botulism, cold,
starvation … and cannibalism on a scale beyond anything we know of in such
circumstances.

I had it in mind to write about him for many years. I wasn’t
sure what I’d do with his story, but I’d grown up hearing about him and had
always found the whole thing fascinating – especially the well-publicized and
romantic heroism (heroine-ism?) of his wife Lady Jane sending out search party
after search party. They were like movie stars of their era. Made front-page
news regularly.

When I got underway with researching I learned, among other
things, that Franklin has been written about a LOT already, in both fiction and
nonfiction, and that he also wrote and published a lot about himself and his
adventures. So very quickly the whole story began to look to me like familiar,
well-traveled ground. And I came to realize that I didn’t want to contribute
yet another well-imagined (but phony) sea-faring story that attempts to “get it
right” while still entertaining a modern day reader with all the familiar
tropes of the idiom … and I also didn’t want to invest a lot of energy in
pretending to undermine all those familiar tropes in order to finally “tell the
truth” about what happened. The really interesting thing about the Franklin
story, for me, is that no one knows “the truth” and no one probably ever will
(though I hear the Canadian government is once again hard at work to find the
sunken ships in hopes of finally getting some answers). Was it lead poisoning,
botulism, starvation, or some weird virus that killed them all? Did any of them
escape and go live with First Nations people for the rest of their lives? We
can’t know. That’s what’s interesting about it to me. I like unanswerable
mysteries. I think life is kind of an unanswerable mystery.

So, I developed this obsessive kid as a lens through which
to look at the whole Franklin story. This gave me license to play with dramatic
historical elements and to explore the whole problematic relationship between
history, story and imagination. What we call “history” is really mostly just a
story we agree to tell each other and believe in. How does imagination figure
into that? Thomas (my character) gave me a way to explore and dramatize
that…and simultaneously to get at the scenes on the ice with the lost sailors.
Plus I just liked him. He’s an interesting and tormented (self-tormenting) kid.

You just published a piece in Poets & Writers that
argues it is possible to teach people to write creatively. Doesn’t the annual
slug of Christmas/holiday letters defy that notion?

Not when the cards come from former students or classmates
and are in rhyming couplets. But come to think of it, n e of them ever hit me
with the annual holiday letter. They’re either too busy writing fiction
or… maybe they don’t like me anymore.

How do writing and
playing music and writing novels and short stories compliment each other?

Short stories: Does this paragraph make my head look big?

Novel: Are you kidding? I wish I could fit into a size 8,000 words! And I’m still tiny for a novel …

Short stories: Size doesn’t matter! How many times do we have to tell you? It’s your depth of focus and extended detailing that gets us hot and riled.

Music: Guys, is anyone going to pay attention to me? I have to learn these new songs…don’t you want to play?

Short stories: And how do you like my use of that crazy research material you were probably saving for your next incarnation? Forgive us, it was so sweet…

Novel: I’m just glad you were able to do something with it! Really, it’s a weight off my mind. Would have taken me hundreds of pages to make it work and I’m so busy already.

Music: Guys?

Novel: But are the walk-on characters in my midsection extraneous? Do I have too many of them, and too many themes and sub-tensions and …?

Short stories: You’re all connected! Don’t worry, everything turns out in the end! You can be baggy. Contain multitudes, wander a little. Relax! Me, I’ve got to watch every single thing I take in and justify the ways…

Music: Guys! We’re going on the road next week. I have to practice so I can remember all this material. Shut up!

Novel: With pleasure. I guess.

Short stories: Just remember to visit us a little in the hotel room instead of watching TV or wasting time on Facebook, OK?

Oh, wait. Did you mean complement, not compliment?

Uh, yes.
To add to what I said above about writing music: Both playing and writing are meditative and expressive, but writing makes sense of things and organizes experience, so it requires a little more distance. For me. When I’m in the thick of trouble or hard times, playing music can be an essential balm. Music can just come out of pure feeling … I guess because it’s more physical and (to state the obvious) it doesn’t use words. Words do something with experience that is really useful and essential, but for me anyway, always has to come later in the process, after I’m calm and have perspective and am ready to think.

What are you writing now?

Beginning a new novel.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

Ten hours to every day.

What else are you passionate about?

Watching the political freak show in our country unfold and
trying to guess what new low we’ll sink to next with the corporatization of
democracy. Riding my bike 1,000 miles every summer. The smell of the pine trees
on the bike trail. The color and smell of my wife’s hair.